Media Centers Displays Worth Checking Out

Admit it: your trip to the library usually involves writing a last-minute paper or possibly getting something printed out — that is — if you have a dime. But do you know what you should do? How about doing something that, to most, appears radical. For instance, walking around the library. There are some way cool displays that the media center directors have created to make your trip to the library anything but boring, and maybe, even educational.

What exactly are these displays? Media center specialist Lori McCall is a frequent visitor to a website called Programming Librarian, an online source that offers ideas to those in the librarian trade.

Our media center has done multiple things to make it a much more fun and lively place including sporting holiday decorations, spearheading book drives and doing just about anything to make the library more of a destination. McCall said that she had a favorite event from a few years ago that had to deal with Halloween. “It was back in the old school building,” she said. “We did stuff like read scary stories and decorate the library with a sort of spookiness.”

McCall recently had an in-library installation about banned books. The installation was designed to raise awareness about the books people have read and the books that have been banned by authorities. “We wanted to show readers the difficulties some authors had to face when they were following their dreams,” she said.

The measure for success of any library installation is easy to figure, McCall said. “If no one comes or they’re uninterested, then maybe we need to think about whether to repeat that idea,” McCall said.

The library is doing things to get people to enter the library. It’s not just a place for books or computer. And if you walk around, you just might learn something.